Cucuta, Colombia

In May I made a trip with Fos Feminista to Cúcuta, Colombia recently to inspect the health services our partner organizations are providing to refugees from Venezuela. Fos partners with a variety of reproductive health and rights organizations and advocacy groups in Colombia (and worldwide) to bring the best in health care to vulnerable women and girls. These groups in turn partner with social service organizations to bring whatever services this population needs.

Cúcuta is the main border crossing from Venezuela – over 7 million refugees have left Venezuela and about a third have settled in Colombia, a country that has problems of its own before the refugee crisis. A river separates the two countries. The refugees often wade across it to avoid border guards. Armed conflict in Colombia continues despite the truce. Organized crime flourishes.

View of Cúcuta – the mountains in the distance are in Venezuela.

We visited the Funvecuc refugee center run by Aid for Aids. 

The kitchen prepared a lunch of spaghetti and beans. We saw about 100 migrants crowding in to get fed. The center does 250 meals a day. The food is donated by the government and NGOs. 

Several NGOs partner at this center and offer social and health services, including retrovirals for HIV, family planning and general medical care. The FF partner in Venezuela, PlaFam, does the family planning work and abortion referrals, even though the center is in Colombia – they use the name Mujeres por Mujeres (Women for Woman). The Colombia government does not provide health care for refugees.

The women often are the victims of sex trafficking on their arduous journey out of Venezuela, sometimes by border guards, army and police. Gender based violence is an omnipresent issue. 

One woman I spoke to was 17 with a 1 ½ year old baby. She had walked with her mother out of Venezuela and had no idea what the family would do next.

We then visited the Fundación Halü health center. This organization, another FF partner, offers holistic care as well as contraception for Venezuelan migrants. There were about 25 girls, age 14-18, waiting for counseling so that they could get a contraceptive implant. Many had traveled up to 4 hours from Venezuela and have a return trip of another 4 hours. It was a powerful statement of what girls with the determination not to get pregnant will endure.